Geffen Playhouse: 5-Play Season Subscription

Geffen Playhouse offers a 5-play subscription to its 2009-10 season. This is your first chance to get tickets to three of the five shows, which aren't yet on sale directly. The package includes Matthew Modine in new satire Matthew Modine Saves the Alpacas, Annette Bening in The Female of the Species, and Laurence Fishburne in Thurgood, which earned him a Tony nomination. Also featured: the award-winning historical drama Equivocation and the new musical Nightmare Alley.

Reviews & Ratings

The Geffen Playhouse is a beautiful theatre. Sometimes you get wonderful performances, but sometimes you get 'Matthew Modine Saves the Alpacas'. This had to be one of the stupidest shows ever. The story had potential to be funny...Matthew Modine is looking to revive his career and decides to take on the Alpacas as a project, but it just jumped awkwardly to the realm of stupid. I don't recommend this show.

The Geffen is one of the finest venues for live theater in Southern California. Unfortunately, this is not one of their highpoints. While the actors are very talented, the script and subject matter were somewhat trite, and at some points,...continued

Description

Matthew Modine stars as Matthew Modine in this rollicking parody of celebrity activism. It’s been decades since Modine’s eighties heartthrob days. So, how can he get back into the limelight? He needs… a Cause. Join Matthew and a comical cast on this world premiere romp through the ridiculous, the hilarious and the utterly offensive.

In a world where history is told by the winner, comes a new play about the night England’s infamous Gunpowder Plot was foiled. For hundreds of years, this event has been celebrated as Guy Fawkes Day, but it’s clear there is no way the night could have unfolded the way the Crown claimed. So, without Fox News at his disposal, how does King James turn fiction into fact? He hires the world’s greatest playwright. Enter William Shakespeare. With the weight of history on their shoulders, Shakespeare and his winsome troupe struggle to dramatize the King’s absurd account without losing their integrity – or their heads. Featuring playful allusions to some of the Bard’s greatest works,_ Equivocation_ is a high-stakes tale where history meets fiction and fiction meets its match.

Academy Award winner Annette Bening returns to the Geffen Playhouse in this wildly wicked farce. Loosely inspired by a real-life incident involving feminist philosopher Germaine Greer, The Female of the Species tells the story of Margot Mason – famed auteur of such influential works as “Madame Ovary,” “Love and Other Four Letter Words” and “The Complete Insignificance of Male Sexuality” – who has retreated to her country home to pen her next masterpiece.

Problem is, nothing’s coming. Nothing, that is, except for a young former student who is intent on taking Margot hostage as punishment for her mixed message ideology. Enter Margot’s overlooked daughter, her simplistic son-in-law, her longtime publisher and a disgruntled cab driver … and all of a sudden a simple kidnapping turns into a battle over who can throw the first punch and get the last word.

Step into Nightmare Alley and enter the titillating world of carnies, cons and clairvoyants. With a score as wild as a funhouse and as evocative as a beautiful tightrope walker, this world premiere musical tells the tale of a young carnie couple who tempt the fickle hand of fate. Based on the darkly evocative 1946 William Lindsay Gresham novel of the same name, Nightmare Alley is a night at the theater full of special effects, wondrous feats and enough spirit to make believers of us all. But remember, here, things are never as they seem.

Witness one of America’s greatest stories told from the stage by one of our greatest story tellers. Tony Award Winner, Emmy Award Winner and Oscar Nominee Laurence Fishburne transforms into Thurgood Marshall to tell the triumphant story of how a boy from the backstreets of Baltimore changed history. From arguing the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education to becoming the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall’s tenacious advocacy broke open the civil rights movement, paving the way for the young African-American leaders of our future.

Fishburne’s acclaimed Broadway performance of Thurgood earned him a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, as well as a Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play.